Supporting Reporting: On the Positive Effects of Text- and Video-Based Awareness Material on Responsible Journalistic Suicide News Writing.
Suicide is a global public health problem. Media impact on suicide is well confirmed and there are several recommendations on how media should and should not report on suicide to minimize the risk of copycat behavior. Those media guidelines have been developed to improve responsible reporting on suicide (RRS). Although such guidelines are used in several countries, we lack empirical evidence on their causal effect on actual journalistic news writing. We conducted an experiment with journalism students (N = 78) in Germany in which we tested whether exposure to awareness material promoting RRS influences news writing. As a supplement to the widely used text-based material, we tested the impac…
Media Effects: Cumulation and Duration
The cumulation of media effects describes a process during which numerous (often, but not necessarily, small) effects accumulate over time as individuals use a certain medium or specific media contents repeatedly. Cumulative effects are especially central in forming individuals' perceptions of reality and are therefore a central premise in several theories and approaches that explain media effects (e.g., cultivation, agenda-setting, or spiral of silence). Whereas effects of single stimuli typically persist only in the short term, cumulative effects of media messages are long-term effects. This entry theorizes on the processes occurring between the short-term effects of a single stimulus and…